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FAQ
This repo (xamarin/xamarincommunitytoolkit), and its associated NuGet Packages (Xamarin.CommunityToolkit and Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.Markup) will remain focused on Xamarin.Forms.
We have created two ways to use the Community Toolkit with .NET MAUI:
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Xamarin.CommunityToolkit.MauiCompat- A MAUI-compatible version of the Xamarin Community Toolkit- Recommended for porting existing Xamarin.Forms apps to .NET MAUI
- A stepping stone to help developers port existing Xamarin.Forms apps to .NET MAUI
- Will not receive new features and will be deprecated alongside Xamarin.Forms
- Not optimized for .NET MAUI; still uses Xamarin.Forms' Custom Renderers, not .NET MAUI Handlers
- More Information: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/introducing-net-maui-compatibility-for-the-xamarin-community-toolkit/
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CommunityToolkit.Maui- The Official .NET MAUI Community Toolkit- Recommended for all .NET MAUI apps going forward
- Will receive new features
- More Information: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-the-net-maui-community-toolkit-preview/
Xamarin.CommunityToolkit will follow a similar support timeline as Xamarin.Forms
Going forward, we recommend everyone use the new .NET MAUI Community Toolkit
We will continue to actively fix bugs thru May 2024 which is the end date for the support of the Xamarin products.
We will continue to accept new features & enhancements until .NET 6 Preview 5 is released. After which, we will continue to maintenance support (bug fixes) while focusing the majority of our time on the next community toolkit supporting .NET MAUI.
First off; that is entirely up to you. If you have a great feature that will benefit Xamarin.Forms users, we would love to take it in. There are several reasons for you to want that:
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Share the development load; since we are with a core team (and hopefully a big community of contributors!) we can share the load to develop and maintain your code and you don't have to do it all by yourself. Of course, you can still be involved, in fact; we would love that!
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Exposure; the Toolkit will probably get a lot of attention and so will your code shining as part of that.
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Get involved! you will be involved in a great and lively community and get to work with us on your ideas and code. Of course, this is also true when you don't bring over your library :)
The thing you might ask yourself is: if Xamarin.Forms is going in maintenance mode, why should I invest time in porting my code to this Toolkit? Which is an excellent question.
Also see the answer to this question for that. Forms is evolving, not going away. So for years to come, people will find this library and use it. And by the time .NET MAUI comes along, my plan is to have features in here that are so good that the .NET MAUI team will be jealous of them and want to have them in their codebase.
In other words, this project is a great place experiment with concepts, let them develop and mature, stabilize and whenever they are good enough, they can move up to be a first-class citizen in .NET MAUI. And even if that doesn't happen, we think there will be enough room for a .NET MAUI Toolkit by that time and that will be just as awesome.
We hope this takes away your doubts, if not, please feel free to reach out!
As always; it depends. It depends on what you're using. Because of the way Forms works, anything that needs a renderer will have to be installed on all platforms. Typically, this is true for all controls and effects.
If you're just using converters or behaviors, this is typically code that only lives on top of Forms and thus you only have to install the Toolkit on your Core project.
However, the Toolkit is linker-safe. This means, any part of the code that you are not using from the Toolkit, will be stripped out at compile time. Therefore, installing the Toolkit on your project will not unnecessarily bloat your application. It should not add the full weight of the Toolkit, just the parts that you are actually using.